I think the most important word here is the word "raise", children need to be raised. But "being free to be whoever they want to be" implies that children can raise themselves.

It's a good insight and led me to respond as follows:

That's a good way of putting it. And you can imagine why this is so. If you are a liberal and you think that there are no objectives purposes in life and that people should just "be themselves" however they see fit, then there is little purpose to parenting your child - there is nothing definite to raise them toward. Parenting just comes to mean accepting unconditionally. Not imposing anything. Giving the child confidence to "be anything you care to be". The parents are just there to ferry the child around as a kind of support crew, rather than transmitting culture, identity, purpose, wisdom, values.

As it happens a news item appeared last week to illustrate concretely how this works. A Canadian mother is raising her son to be gender fluid. Look at how she explains her decision:

I want my son to grow up knowing he has a voice. Grow up knowing he can do and be ANYTHING he wants to be in this world.

Because I am the parent he needs me to be, he knows ... That me and his father will love him without fail.

Some days he says he wants to be a girl with a vagina and we simply tell him, “When you’re an adult, you can certainly make the decision to change to that if you wish”. ...We support our child in whoever they are and look forward to seeing how their gender expression manifests as they age.

Here we have the logic of liberal parenting set out openly. First, the belief that the highest principle is one of being self-determined or self-defined, as when she says that she wants her son to "Grow up knowing he can do and be ANYTHING he wants to be in this world."

This leads her to the idea that her role is not to interfere with who the child becomes, but instead to take the "support crew" role ("We support our child in whoever they are").

The assumption is that the child will become "the best version of themselves" by himself alone; that he will, in Mark Moncrieff's words, raise himself while his parents look on with interest.

One final point. The father is partly at fault here. Mothers have an instinct to give unconditional love to their children, fathers have a stronger instinct to socialise their sons toward a successful manhood. The father in this case is not even trying.

6 comments:

The love is not unconditional as humans are incapable of such. She won't mention what they are, but the conditions exist( if her child becomes a serial rapist, for example.)

I don't understand the flippancy about surgery. One of my children was acutely ill once and required several. She wished he would undergo the knife at the prime of his life as a young man? My hope is my children never require surgery let alone choose it.

We're done. I realize that the number of these defective parents is relatively small. But, it is clearly growing in an atmosphere of excited approval and appreciation. I don't see how - short of apocalypse - that realignment with the increasingly denied and defied natural order magically materializes. Civilized men in the West observe, note and do little-to-nothing on a range of existential issues, while the uncivilized living elsewhere and who increasingly invade the West impose their much stronger will against our ineffective weak resistance. Who's going to sacrifice himself for that boy? That this sick father proudly posed for this photo and no one (no uncle, no neighbor, no friend, no stranger) has done anything, much less like dragging dad's sick ass outside and horse-whipping him, rescuing the boy from him and his sick mother, and then burning their house to the ground as a warning; is clear evidence that weak, modern males seem lately incapable of acting against increasingly routine and everyday evil. Who, other than an occasional organized and late state action half a world away, is willing to root-out the sick or evil next-door dad who lovingly dresses his son as a girl, or a devout Muslim neighbor whose twenty-something son or daughter begins visiting Syria or Iran after Hijj to Mecca. We're done. If grown men don't act outside of the feckless state authority in ways that matter, notwithstanding the damage to our own well-being, we are done. Civility in opposition of evil, is arguably evil itself. It is either as it is chronicled in these pages, or it is not.

is clear evidence that weak, modern males seem lately incapable of acting against increasingly routine and everyday evil

We've left it too late. Modern western males should have been pushing back against this nonsense twenty or thirty years ago. Now the feminist/LGBT crazies have a massive apparatus of state oppression behind them to enforce their craziness. We're paying the price for decades of retreat and surrender.

Individual men are in no position to oppose this kind of stuff. They'd just be picked off one by one and destroyed. Only collective action could achieve anything. And we're no longer a society - we're just a bunch of greedy, selfish, short-sighted, atomised individuals incapable of group action.

The cultural left never tries to fight its battles as individuals. They always hunt in packs. That's why they've always won.

Exactly. Well said.No one wants to live next door - or be in - a family that now sees them as an enemy. We look away and concentrate our thoughts on avoidance and displays of tolerance. I'm very good at it. We're trapped like hungry wild pigs. A pile of fresh corn appears like magic, near only one strange steel-cage wall. Next time two walls. Then the final gate slams shut on the fat and content pigs. More unsuspecting pigs find magic piles of corn while just some of the cage adjusted pigs lament their mistakes. The others silently just look away. A rare pig gets it and squeals that it's a trap. He's shot and eaten first.I still have not read Animal Farm. I suspect that's a part of it?